House of Wisdom: Public Programme

House of Wisdom Nottingham: Exhibition Public Programme

Programme Curator: Cüneyt Çakırlar 

Didem Erk, “Black Thread”, installation, 2017.

Istanbul Queer Art Collective

Performance

Visiting Bibliophiles: Fellowship of Books

Following their performance of Psychic Bibliophiles: What the Cards Say in Amsterdam, Tuna Erdem and Seda Ergül will visit NTU Emeritus Professor of Gay and Lesbian Studies, Gregory Woods. Presenting their Just in Bookcase, they will have a conversation on queer archiving and memory. The video documentation of this event will be available after the performance. 

3 October 2018 Wednesday

Prof. Wendy Shaw (Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany)

Talk

Islam in the River of Wisdoms [event details and booking]

Venue: Five Leaves Bookshop, 14a Long Row, Nottingham NG1 2DH

Time: 19:00-21:00

Modern celebrations of the 8th century library House of Wisdom in Baghdad often paint it as the symbol of an Islamic golden age: a shining light of the East against the dark ages of the medieval West; and a shining light of the past against the dark ages of modern associations between Islam and terror. But history is much more complex. More than a single institution, the House of Wisdom was a practice of transcultural transition and layered translation, where antique philosophy rejected by Christian Rome persisted through the funnel of Sassanian Iran and informed a nascent Islam hungry for knowledge, regardless of origin. It calls on us to imagine not a golden age of Islam as distinct from its surroundings, but as part and parcel of late antique cultures whose overwhelming interest in discovering truth is all too often erased in our modern concern for authenticity. Situating the House of Wisdom not as a golden age of Islam but as a transcultural inheritance, this talk explores how the early Islamic state enriched its coffers of wisdom through recognizing the value of knowledge regardless of nation or creed. Focusing on music, epics, and fables, it looks at practices of internalization at the heart of early Islam that modernity has all too often forgotten.

10 October 2018 Wednesday

Misal Adnan Yıldız (ASA Berlin, Germany)

Talk

A Feeling of Loss: Mutterzunge [event details]

Venue: Primary, Reading Room, 33 Seely Road, Nottingham NG7 3FZ

Time: 18:00-20:00

Misal Adnan Yıldız will present a lecture, which is based on his curatorial project entitled Mutterzunge. The project is composed of seven chapters and it engages in conversations with the book of the same name by Berlin-based author Emine Sevgi Özdamar. Yıldız’s research draws upon mostly primary sources including studio visits and interviews with the author and participating artists, research and production notes, as well as everyday life anecdotes focusing on politics of silence, feeling of loss and biographies of transition. Presenting several new productions from Mutterzunge’s Berlin programme, the lecture will look at recent works of Şener Özmen, Mehtap Baydu, Mohammad Salemy among others with critical questions about the close connections between the global memory, transnational dynamics and how to narrate social changes within personal traumas.

17 October 2018 Wednesday

Film Screening (introduced by Cüneyt Çakırlar, NTU)

Gürcan Keltek’s Colony (2015)  [event details and booking]

Venue: BON143, Bonington, Nottingham Trent University, Dryden Street, NG1 4GG

Time: 18:00-20:00

The sun rises at the Beşparmak Mountains. The autonomous Missing Persons Committee is conducting excavations at these mountains along with scientists and undercover witnesses. Skeletons will be exhumed and delivered to the families. The ghosts of unopened mass graves wander in evacuated villages, valleys. 'Colony' is a film about psychogeography, the memory of landscape, trauma and remembrance.

22 October 2018 Monday

Talk/Workshop

Dr Aylin Kuryel (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)

UPLEFTER: Workshop on Political Depression [event details and booking]

Venue: BON146, Bonington, Nottingham Trent University, Dryden Street, NG1 4GG

Time: 18:00-20:00 

Over the years, we have witnessed, across cities and groups, a decrease in the motivation to act together and the belief in the possibility of influencing change, especially after right-wing victories and internal conflicts within the left. Political depression might induce feeling of anxiety and hopelessness and can lead to nostalgia, sarcasm and eventually cynicism. It is a less personal but more collective experience, which is not adequately and collectively addressed. The aim of this workshop is helping contextualize political depression, rather than isolating it as a personal and negative feeling that should be gotten rid of. It will provide a platform on which we will contemplate on the diverse but related reasons behind political depression and attempt to find various ways to deal with it and act upon it. With the participation of people from diverse backgrounds, following a set of questions prepared in advance, it will allow a debate on political depression as an affective condition that influences the ways in which we relate to ourselves and others.

24 October 2018 Wednesday

Exhibition Walkthrough with Mine Kaplangı & Cüneyt Çakırlar

Meeting Point: Bonington Gallery (entrance), NTU, Dryden Street, NG1 4GG

Time: 13:00-15:00

24 October 2018 Wednesday

Film Screening (introduced by Cüneyt Çakırlar, NTU)

Shevaun Mizrahi’s Distant Constellation (2017) [event details and booking]

Venue: BON143, Bonington, Nottingham Trent University, Dryden Street, NG1 4GG

Time: 18:00-20:00 

This haunted reverie drops us inside an Istanbul retirement home, where the battle-scarred residents bask in the camera’s attention. A creaky- voiced woman confides her personal account of the Armenian genocide. A sweetly deluded pianist performs a composition before confessing his love. A blind photographer fiddles with his flash as he points his own camera back at us. Shevaun Mizrahi’s playful, immaculately controlled film finds hypnotizing rhythms in the residents’ limbo-like state. Meanwhile, outside, ominous construction equipment transforms the land.

The public programme events for the House of Wisdom Nottingham are sponsored by School of Arts and Humanities, Nottingham Trent University. Sponsored by Arts Council England, the exhibition and its programme are also supported by Bonington Gallery, Primary, Five Leaves Bookshop, Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature, and Bromley House Library.

Exhibition: House of Wisdom Nottingham (27 September - 28 October 2018)

ARTISTS: Mohamed Abdelkarim, Burak Arıkan, Mahmoud Bakhshi, Yael Bartana, Mehtap Baydu, Kürşat Bayhan, Ruth Beale, Ekin Bernay, Burçak Bingöl, Nicky Broekhuysen, Hera Büyüktaşçıyan, Cansu Çakar, Ramesch Daha, Işıl Eğrikavuk, Didem Erk, Foundland Collective, Deniz Gül, Beril Gür, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, İstanbul Queer Art Collective (Tuna Erdem and Seda Ergül), Ali Kazma, Yazan Khalili, Göksu Kunak, Mona Kriegler, Fehras Publishing Practices, Elham Rokni, Natascha Sadr Haghighian & Ashkan Sepahvand, Sümer Sayın, Erinç Seymen, Bahia Shehab, Walid Siti, Ali Taptık, Erdem Taşdelen, Özge Topçu, Viron Erol Vert, Ali Yass, Eşref Yıldırım, Ala Younis

Curated by Collective Çukurcuma (Naz Cuguoğlu and Mine Kaplangı)

Public Programme Curator: Cüneyt Çakırlar

PREVIEW: Thursday 27 September, 5 pm – 7 pm
RSVP boningtongallery@ntu.ac.uk

DATES: Friday 28 September – Saturday 27 October
TIMES: Monday – Friday, 10 am – 5 pm, Saturday, 11 am – 3 pm

VENUES: Bonington Gallery Vitrines and Atrium at Nottingham Trent University's School of Art & Design, Bromley House Library, Five Leaves Bookshop and Primary.

“To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions-there we have none.” 
Virginia Woolf, How Should One Read a Book, 1925

Throughout history, libraries have been perceived as places where information on life and space are organised, read, and interpreted. Their political significance, however, has at times been underestimated. As in the example of the original House of Wisdom*, libraries are also known as centers of research, learning, and sharing. This concentration and exchange of knowledge makes them important symbols of political power and the formation of cultural identity. Based on the power of libraries, and Foucault’s notion of the archive as ‘the general system of the formation and transformation of statements’, the curators followed their archival urge and decided to build their own archive-library. To shed light on the increasing levels of censorship on information, knowledge and the current sociopolitical situation in and around Turkey, they invited artists and researchers to take part in the project. The House of Wisdom, ever-evolving library-exhibition aims to rethink the political nature of books, whose mere existence is under threat, and ultimately asks the question: ‘What could be the outcome of collectively rethinking the notion of the archive and knowledge production through art, particularly when issues such as censorship and suppression of information are involved?’


House of Wisdom is an open space, a gathering place. Visitors are invited to enter and discover the library-exhibition to read, discuss, collaborate, scheme, and exchange knowledge and ideas. And with its fourth location, the exhibition is expanding throughout the city of Nottingham. Inviting visitors to walk and discover the city with the exhibition map, House of Wisdom will utilise the Vitrines of Bonington Gallery and the Atrium of the Nottingham Trent University’s School of Art and Design. Artworks and books will also be placed in other venues like local bookshops (The Five Leaves Bookshop) an old primary school that has been transformed into an art space (Primary) and a historical library (Bromley House Library). By expanding the exhibition space from one room to various spaces around the city, House of Wisdom is hoping the build an invisible relation between being a visitor and being a wanderer. And this year the exhibition’s public program is curated by Dr. Cüneyt Çakırlar from Nottingham Trent University, who organised a series of events including performances, workshops, reading groups, talks and screenings.

More details about the exhibition's public programme will be announced shortly.

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*House of Wisdom (Bayt-al Hikma) was a library founded in the beginning of the 8th century in Baghdad, where thousands of books in various languages from different regions, on philosophy, art, science, and history were housed. Researchers from different regions came together to make research, and work on techniques of translation, writing, and discussion.

**House of Wisdom is a mobile and ever-evolving library/exhibition curated by Collective Çukurcuma. It was previously shown at Dzialdov (Berlin, 2017), IKSV Building (Public program of the 15th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, 2017) and Framer Framed (Amsterdam, 2017).

House of Wisdom Nottingham is produced and organised by Queer Art Projects and made possible by Arts Council National Lottery Project Grants with the support of Nottingham Trent University, Bonington Gallery, Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature, Bromley House Library, Primary and Five Leaves Bookshop.
http://www.boningtongallery.co.uk/exhibitions/bonington-vitrines-8-house-of-wisdom

Image credit: ALI TAPTIK, "Atlas" from the "Meridians" series, 2011 [on display in House of Wisdom]
Image credit: MONA KRIEGLER, Pain and Memory, digital still, 2012 – 13 [on display in HoW]

House of Wisdom: Cross-Cultural Mobility and Post-Gallery Curatorial Practice

House of Wisdom: Cross-cultural Mobility and Post-gallery Curatorial Practice
Panel Discussion, Friday 29 June, 6pm-8pm, Primary Nottingham (link for details)

Reflections on archive, censorship, cultural dissidence and geopolitics in contemporary arts, followed by a Q&A. [Video Documentation]

House of Wisdom is an on-going research and a mobile, ever-evolving library/exhibition curated by Collective Çukurcuma (Naz Cuguoğlu & Mine Kaplangı) in 2017. Inspired by the library of the same name founded in Baghdad at the beginning of the 8th century, the House of Wisdom exhibition is investigating the political relevance of books and libraries. By creating an open space and a gathering place in different cities around the world, House of Wisdom has invited its visitors to enter the library-exhibition to read, discuss, collaborate, scheme, and exchange knowledge and ideas. The library/exhibition was first held in Dzialdov, Berlin, in May 2017, then travelled to Istanbul as part of the 15th Istanbul Biennial’s public programme and to Framer Framed, Amsterdam, in November 2017. The show will travel to Nottingham this Autumn, hosted by Bonington Gallery.

Event Organiser, Chair and Respondent: Dr Cüneyt Çakırlar (Nottingham Trent University)

Speakers“Curating House of Wisdom”, Mine Kaplangı (Collective Çukurcuma, Istanbul)
“The Unknown Story of an Infamous Library”, Işıl Eğrikavuk (Berlin)
“Just in Bookcase”, Tuna Erdem & Seda Ergül (Istanbul Queer Art Collective, London)

In her talk on “Curating House of Wisdom”, Mine Kaplangı will speak about the exhibition’s next route to Bonington Gallery, Nottingham, and how the current research and production process is shaping in collaboration with Nottingham Contemporary and UNESCO City of Literature.

In her talk “The Unknown Story of an Infamous Library”, the artist Işıl Eğrikavuk will speak about her contribution to House of Wisdom, namely Infamous Library, which is a project she realised in several stages between the years 2006 and 2014. Unfolding in performative, narrative and mock-documentary platforms, Eğrikavuk’s work deals with fiction, history, politics and humour. Eğrikavuk is the winner of Turkey’s first contemporary art prize, Full Art Prize in 2012. She has participated in numerous international exhibitions, residencies, and her work has been published in both local and international journals. She currently lives in Berlin and is a faculty member at Universität der Künste (UdK), Department of Media.

The founding members of Istanbul Queer Art Collective Tuna Erdem & Seda Ergül will talk about their work “Just in Bookcase”, which was created especially for the House of Wisdom exhibition. “Just in Bookcase” is about the im/mobility of books/libraries, immigrants/refugees, the dead weight of books and the fleeting stories of living libraries, accumulation/collection, dismantling/dispersion and travelling/fleeing with emotional/excess baggage. In 2017, Erdem and Ergül moved to London and founded Queer Art Projects Ltd. to produce art events including performances, conferences, exhibitions, talks and parties. They currently host Turkish Delight, a monthly queer performance night at The Glory, London.

House of Wisdom’s Contributing Artists: Mohamed Abdelkarim, Burak Arıkan, Mahmoud Bakhshi, Yael Bartana, Mehtap Baydu, Kürşat Bayhan, Ekin Bernay, Burçak Bingöl, Nicky Broekhuysen, Hera Büyüktaşçıyan, Cansu Çakar, Ramesch Daha, Işıl Eğrikavuk, Didem Erk, Foundland Collective, Deniz Gül, Beril Gür, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, İstanbul Queer Art Collective (Tuna Erdem and Seda Ergül), Ali Kazma, Yazan Khalili, Göksu Kunak, Mona Kriegler, Fehras Publishing Practices, Elham Rokni, Natascha Sadr Haghighian & Ashkan Sepahvand, Sümer Sayın, Erinç Seymen, Bahia Shehab, Walid Siti, Ali Taptık, Erdem Taşdelen, Özge Topçu, Viron Erol Vert, Ali Yass, Eşref Yıldırım, Ala Younis